Generally, it's always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach — and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it's the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it's clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all.
After years of insisting that Congress must act to "protect the border" and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it's all up to the president. (They say this, by the way, even as they whine incessantly over Biden's attempts to relieve Americans of their crushing burden of student loan debt, claiming that he's behaving like a tyrant.)
All of this is nothing but another right-wing kabuki dance, staged by the Republican Party whenever they come close to getting what they've asked for. For them, this is all a game in which they believe they can strongarm Democrats into total capitulation. They put on quite a show but it never works.
In the past they tended to play this hand around economic issues, rending their garments over the deficit, demanding that Democrats slash domestic spending to the bone or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government. In fact, they have done just that in the past year which resulted in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by the right-wing when he negotiated a deal with the Democratic Senate and the White House to raise the debt ceiling and avoid economic catastrophe. This wasn't the first time they did this and it also resulted in the resignation of an earlier GOP speaker. This tactic doesn't hurt the Democrats, it hurts their own leaders.
The plan this year was to jam the White House in an election year over the budget to hammer home the allegedly terrible Biden economy in the run up to the election. But as it happens, the economy has made a robust recovery from the mess created by the pandemic so that issue doesn't look like it's going to be the big winner they expected it to be. So they've shifted their focus to immigration after having turned the issue into a roiling "crisis" by shipping migrants to Democratic-run cities around the country to own the libs and inflame the xenophobic right.
The idea of the legislation was to up the ante by combining funding for more border security with the vital need for military equipment to Ukraine and further support for Israel and Taiwan. The thinking was that the bipartisan desire to help Ukraine and Israel would push through the border part but it didn't turn out that way. When he finally started to see the writing on the wall, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dryly said last week, "the politics have changed." But actually, they really haven't.
The original concept that everyone would have something to love and hate in the bill and they'd all make their peace with it and move on is how negotiations are supposed to work, and there are members who still think that's how it should be, particularly in the Senate. The MAGA faction, however, like the Tea Party before them, thinks negotiating is for losers. So the Republicans got tough and told Biden that he was going to have to swallow a terrible border deal that offers nothing to the Democrats in return for not allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine and supplying more military aid for Israel.
Biden capitulated and they got what they said they wanted. And, surprise, it turns out it wasn't what they wanted after all. Now they say they want Biden to unilaterally declare war on the border via executive order and are refusing to do any deal at all. They argue that the deal that's being discussed authorizes the president to "close the border" when the number of crossings reaches a certain threshold and that's just not good enough. Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted this utterly fatuous statement last night: "Any border "shutdown" authority that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing is a non-starter. Thousands each day is outrageous. The number must be ZERO."
There has never been nor will there ever be "zero" migrant crossings on the US-Mexico border. Nothing could be more absurd. But that makes it very clear that they have no intention of doing any kind of deal. They have shifted the responsibility completely on to Biden and that's where they will leave it.
This is reminiscent of the budget negotiations back in 2011 when then-vice president Biden got involved in the delicate budget negotiations and agreed to give away the store on Social Security only to have the Tea Party refuse to take yes for an answer. We ended up with a Rube Goldberg sequestration compromise that ended up serving the Democrats better than the Republicans, thankfully. There were no cuts to Social Security and the Republicans lost badly in 2012, largely because the country was appalled by their antics.
The question today is whether the dynamic has changed in their favor or if this issue is more potent than government shutdowns and threats of economic catastrophe. This time, the real incentive for the Republicans to tank this negotiation is because Donald Trump wants them to. He has said so plainly, making it clear that doesn't want the Democrats to have a win on this issue.
The last thing any of them want is to stop the bleeding and that includes the horror of children drowning in the Rio Grande because Trump ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, joined by 25 other red state governors, is provoking a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court and refusing to allow the Border Patrol to do its duty. And they are about to put on a full-fledged spectacle by impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over policy differences, which even their own legal allies say does not fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. And, as we know too well, there can be no conviction in the Senate without a 2/3rd majority so it's just another exercise in futility.
The big question is whether or not this latest stunt will succeed for the GOP where all the others have failed. The ongoing chaos in the House and Trump's blatant demand to keep the issue for his election argue in favor of it ending with a whimper not a bang. But nothing can be taken for granted right now and we have to hope that somehow we find our way through this mess without too many people suffering and dying because of it. It's not looking very hopeful at the moment.
